Come From Away

Henry (my neighbour behind) sent me an e-mail worth sharing:

Just so you know…. This is what they’ve been saying to you every time you steal their eggs and when you’re putting them to bed at night. You’ll want to make sure young ears and psyches do not sustain collateral damage from this file’s content.

H

Attachment: Chickentalk.mp3

Well, the season of uninvited guests has started early this year
(no, no, I am not talking about any of our readers… Of course you are always welcome to visit! )
Last Saturday, I did my normal morning rounds of the barn after feeding the horses and chickens. With free range chickens, every morning and evening is an easter egg hunt. It feels even more so given the colours of the eggs that our hens lay. I looked behind an old piece of wood that I propped up for the chickens as a wind shield. There’s often a few eggs behind there. Instead of eggs, I found a friend:

He/she looked up sleepily and went back to sleep. I guess it is still early in the season for them to be truly active. I left it there and left hoping in vane that it would soon tire of the warm, dry barn full of eggs and chicken food to eat and leave of its own accord.

The next morning it was gone. Hurray! Sound the trumpets! Wait…. Perhaps it is just sleeping in another place. I looked all over the barn and it was nowhere to be seen. Hurray! Sound the trumpets! Waaaaaaait…. There’s one place I did not look, yet. In the corner of the barn, there’s an old food trough that i pulled off the wall to make the stall better for a horse…

I approached slowly and quietly. Reaching out carefully, I grab the lip of the six foot long trough and flip it over as I step back. Peering intensely into the gloomy corner for any sign of a white stripe, I am at first relieved, but then alarmed as there is not one stripe, but two! It looks like there may soon be fifteen skunks in the barn… Ack!

Happily, we were back to one the following day… Being particularly brave (ie stupid), I decided to get it out of the damn barn >:o … I splashed it with water until it actually got up and started walking around. When it did not immediately spray me, i got braver (ie stupider) and poked it with a broom handle in the direction that I wanted it to go. Eventually, it went towards the door and I took the plastic pitch fork, scooped it up and tossed it out the door.

The next few days we were skunk free. I, the brave hero, had showed it my complete fearlessness (absolute stupidity) and scared it off….

Today, we are back to one skunk……………

Technorati Tags: country living

We purchased a “large dog” harness for Portobello. He hates putting it on, but loves going for walks.

“B” and myself took him out for a quick test run and he was very well behaved! He listened much better and pulled much less than any big puppy would have. Since the test run, “B” has walked him two other times by herself (in and around the back yard)…

Last night, however, we (K) noticed that a patch on his back was weeping and it seems that he developed some sort of rope burn from the harness. He has very different hair than a dog, so it seems that the seams where the harness is sewed together was rubbing on him. We have a “fluffy” that you put on horse harnesses to stop them from getting “rubs” on their face and will try to adapt this to help Mr. Portobello.

How can you tell when you are directly at the central intersection of town? Well, I figure that this has to be it for Montague. While waiting for our pizza to be made, “B” and I took a walk down Main St. in Montague. We took a picture of this sign and an old tree that “B” thought looked neat. The Free Church was behind it (so it’s in the picture also).

She loves taking pictures and has appropriated the old digital camera. When the weather gets nicer, the two of us will likely go on some picture taking excursions together… I’ll have to find a photo gallery plug-in for WordPress (our blogging software).

There’s a small Irving tanker ship that is often anchored right off the Hillsborough bridge. It appears to be delivering gasoline. I only had the crummy little camera and no tripod, so this was the best picture I could get of it. Given how often it is there, I am sure that I will have another opportunity to get a better pic.

When looking at it straight on you can see the words “NO SMOKING” painted in letters that must be about 10 feet high. . .

I took the Van to see Leon at Belfast Automotive today. It needed an oil change and brakes
While I was waiting around for the oil change to be done, I could not help but notice this pickup sitting out front.

Read as a stereotypical used car salesman:

Are you tired of your truck rusting out?! Well, friend, we have the perfect solution… Wood panelling! Not only will this baby never rust, it is guaranteed to make your pickup into a unique chick magnet. They’ll be flocking to your side once they see you cruising down the street in this baby.

Technorati Tags: country living

I rented the Borat movie this week-end. I was struck by something…. I knew Borat’s twin.

Steve
Borat
Click Borat to see him turn into Steve->

I found a great magazine which led to an interesting web site and then to the following short speech (14 minutes). It’s very interesting.

Check out Skeptic.com

K had stepped outside to do some horsey stuff and I was in the shower. The boys were focused on the TV. The Wii had them locked in the mystical trance of video games and boys that has had scientists scratching their heads in puzzlement since the advent of pong. . .

Noticing his completely unsupervised state, Portobello decided get into trouble. He moved the kitchen table chairs so that he could step on them and then put his head up over the table to grab what’s on the top. This time he struck it rich with one of the best finds a pig could ever find and quickly started to help himself to the contents of K’s purse…

I came out of the shower to find him with his face buried up to his eyes and quickly took away the purse which, lucky for him, was undamaged this time. I also picked up a snorfed up cheque book, crush eyeliner, thankfully untouched wallet and a thing that looked like a syringe (weird, I thought K had given up the heroine…).

K comes inside from her horsiness about an 45 minutes later and I tell her that Portobello had her purse (in that nagging sort of, you should have known better young lady voice that she likes so much). She sees the damaged syringe and gets quite worried… Apparently, it was not something as harmless has heroine or crack cocaine, but instead a potentially lethal amount of silver smithing soldering paste. I had been ignoring Mister Portobello as I was still a bit annoyed with him and he was just standing in front of the wood stove trying to garner what heat he could from the embers that were slowly burning out…

K checks him over and we notice that he has quite a shake going on as small convulsions cause his blubbery head to wobble in a a most disturbing manner. K springs to action like any good mom would do and I sigh and feel just a bit more tired and fed up with just-about-everything… The first aid instructions on the silver paste say to give several glasses of milk and milk of magnesia. K calls the vet and we follow the instructions… The vet says that a full stomach would be better than empty, so we feed him his lunch. It was lunch time anyway. Today he gets a double lunch…

The vet is one the way…

Portobello thinks this is great as he quickly guzzles down 1.5 litres of milk and several tablespoons full of milk of magnesia. His stomach is so round that he looks like he has swallowed a basketball. I get the fire going nice and strong and K sits on the floor in front of the fire fawning over him. He’s sitting on her lap, covered in a blanket that he is normally not allowed to go near, being hugged and pet. He is in heaven. . .

The vet arrives…

Portobello looks fine. We talk to the vet for a while. Dr. Andrews really looks like he would like a pet piggy. He asks us many questions about keeping him in the house. Portobello looks great. He wags his tail and sniffs Dr. Andrews. Eventually, he gets his heart listened to and eyes checked. Dr. Andrews leaves without giving Mr. Portobello the shot of calcium that he brought for him (much to Portobello’s relief).

Portobello is absolutely fine today.

It never gets boring around here! I wonder whose turn it is to almost die next week?!

Not for me thanks!

I find that what really gets me going in the morning is crouching down with a hair dryer trying to thaw the water in the barn to fill the buckets for the horses. There’s nothing quite like the immensely uncomfortable position, the smell of burnt hair and cooking chicken excrement. YUM!

During the last few extremely cold days, I have been lucky enough to get to do this twice a day… just before breakfast and just before dinner… All those people out there who pay for all the diet books, pills, etc, should think about getting a backyard chicken coop.

Technorati Tags: country living